April Mullen is on the phone during a frantic morning of interviews in Toronto. She just flew in from Vancouver, where she was shooting a TV series, to do press for a movie she filmed well over a year ago.

After this? She hopes to go home to Niagara Falls and chill. Unless her parents put her to work at the family’s Mullen Garden Market.

As one of Canada’s busiest female directors, she’s growing used to the frantic pace.

“I’m OK, I’m taking lot of vitamins and I haven’t been sick, so that’s good,” she says. “I’m excited to see my parents and excited to be home, that’s for sure.”

But first up is the theatrical release of her gang drama Badsville, opening at Toronto’s Carlton Cinema Friday and Video-on-Demand in February.

Filmed two years ago, even before Mullen’s romantic drama Below Her Mouth, it stars newcomer Ian McLaren as a gang leader forced to confront a rival group called the Aces while plotting his escape from the life with a local girl (Tamara Duarte) he falls hard for. It also stars Sons of Anarchy’s Emilio Rivera and Prison Break’s Robert Knepper as toughened gang veterans.

Unlike the erotic Below Her Mouth — filmed with an all-female crew — Badsville is a violent drama as intense as anything Mullen has filmed.

But it’s the soft centre that hooked her.

“The core of this film is still a love story, and it’s about hope, and a man who has a dream to get out,” she says. “But then it’s surrounded by harsh violence, harsh reality, and a town that offers no hope at all.”

McLaren also co-wrote the script, his first, which was forwarded to Mullen by Toronto producer David Phillips.

“I read it and it just had this really fresh, unique voice. It had a rockabilly, greaser gangster feel to it,” she says. “It was sort of timeless, like it’s set in the ’20s or ’30s.

“It feels kind of innocent and locked in time.”

Mullen is hoping to arrange a Niagara Falls screening, as she does for all her movies. In the meantime, she’ll host Q&A’s at three Carlton Cinema screenings this weekend — Friday at 9 p.m. and Saturday at 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Unlike the comedies she started out with (Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Way of the Tosser; Gravy Train; Dead Before Dawn), Mullen’s recent films have run the gamut from horror (Farhope Tower) to romance (Below Her Mouth) to action (88). Her next film, shooting this spring in New Mexico and likely Niagara Falls, will be another thriller reuniting her with longtime filmmaking partner Tim Doiron.

She’ll also be returning to the supernatural TV show Wynonna Earp after directing two Season 2 episodes last year.

For the past three weeks she has been filming the 15th episode of Season 3 for the DC superhero show Legends of Tomorrow, airing in the spring.

“It was really fun,” she says. “Lots of wires, lots of flying, lots of levitations, some explosions.”